Closing up

Hello to everyone who has been following us on our adventures!

We're getting ready to leave Jos this Thursday. It's bitter sweet for us because we have come to make so many good friends and relationships here that we are genuinely sad to be leaving. We are however excited to be coming back home to friends and family. We have also recently found out that Kristen as gotten a job in St. Paul working for the University of Minnesota for a 1 year contract, so now we have somewhere to go with a specific purpose in mind. The 1 year appointment is a good fit for our transitory stage of life right now, this way we can get our feet under us and figure out what our next move will be. We are very excited about the job, the move to St. Paul and living closer to at least some of our family. I will either be finishing up my graduate degree, which I started at Colorado State, in St. Paul, getting a job to pay back some student loans or a combination of the two.

We will be arriving in the US on Saturday the 25th at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport, where Kristen's paretns will be picking us up. From there we will be spending a few days in Fargo with family and then going down to St. Paul so Kristen can have an orientation meeting with her new boss and for us to try to find an apartment. She starts on Novemeber 3rd, so we don't have much time to get adjusted from the trip to Nigeria. We are blessed to have some great friends in the area who have said we could stay with them for a few weeks until we find housing, so it looks like we can hit the ground running. With this new opportunity, we will most likely not be able to make it back to see our friends in Colorado in the near future, nor family in Connecticut. We are sad about this, but hopeful that we will be able to make a trip out soon to see our friends in both states.

I have also uploaded some pictures on a flickr webpage for everyone to look at. Sorry this has taken so long, but trying to put pictures on the net with our connection can be tedious. The web address is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29780840@N04/sets/72157608114760515/, which puts you into the album I created entitled JP and Kristen in Nigeria. There is another album entitled Sewing, Knitting, Arts and Crafts, on the entry webpage to our flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29780840@N04/, which contains pictures taken of the items and people in the sewing, knitting and arts and crafts school. I have been trying to set the social service center's skill acquisition group up with an organization in the US which markets and sells products created by African workers in the US so that there is a larger maerket for their products. This album contains pictures of the (mostly) women and the products they make.

I hope all is well and please pray for our safe travels on our return.

Jon Paul and Kristen